£4.00 – £5.50
Part rigorous history, part insightful commentary, and part memoir, Mad Skills tells the story behind MIDI, through the twentieth century’s kaleidoscopic lens.
Guiding us across one hundred years of musical instruments, and the music made with them, it recounts the technical and creative innovations that led to the making of the most vital, long-standing, ubiquitous, and yet invisible music technology of our time.
“Most people have no idea what MIDI is, even though it undergirds and regulates a substantial swathe of the sounds they listen to and love. In Ryan Alexander Diduck’s deeply researched telling — a biography of a technology, with a caustic critical edge — MIDI takes on a personality of its own even as it standardizes global music production to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Blending technical knowledge, business history, and cultural polemic, Mad Skills is a sharp study of a human invention that stamped its post-human character over an entire era of pop.”
“Mad Skills is a history of electronic music technology, of scraps over standards, and of music’s relationship to capital in the twentieth century. Through deep dives into archives, original interviews, and an aptitude for the Marxian archaeology of electronics, Diduck opens the black box of MIDI for all to see and hear.”
“A deep, clear read on the historical and social development of machine music; wisdom about MIDI finally.”
